“Debate about gambling reveals fundamental fault lines in American character, sharp tensions between an impulse toward risk and a zeal for control. Those tensions may be universal, but seldom have they been so sharply opposed as in the United States, where longings for a lucky strike have been counterbalanced by a secular Protestant Ethic that has questioned the very existence of luck. That conflict is the subject of this book. It is not a history of gambling per se, but a history of conflicting attitudes toward luck. Contemporary gambling games recall ancient rituals — attempts to divine the decrees of fate, and conjure the wayward force of luck. Those rituals were (and are) rooted in a distinctive world view, based on a certain respect — even reverence for chance. This outlook contrasted sharply with what became an American creed: the faith that we can master chance through force of will, and that rewards will match merits in this world as well as the next. For me, writing about luck is a way of eavesdropping on a contentious conversation at the core of our culture a conversation that raises fundamental ethical, philosophical, and even religious issues.
‘What makes the conversation so revealing is that it counterposes two distinct accounts of American character. One narrative puts the big gamble at the center of American life: from the earliest English settlements at Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay, risky ventures in real estate (and other less palpable commodities) power the progress of a fluid, mobile democracy. The speculative confidence man is the hero of this tale the man (almost always he is male) with his eye on the Main Chance rather than the Moral Imperative. The other narrative exalts a different sort of hero — a disciplined self-made man, whose success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan. The first account implies a contingent universe where luck matters and admits that net worth may have nothing to do with moral worth. The second assumes a coherent universe where earthly rewards match ethical merits and suggests that Providence has ordered this world as well as the next.
“The self-made man has proven to be a far more influential culture hero than the confidence man. The secular version of Providence has resonated with some characteristically American presumptions. A providential sense of destiny could be expanded from individuals to groups and ultimately to nations-and to none more easily than the United States. Even before there was a United States, colonial orators assumed their settlements would play a redemptive role in the sacred drama of world history. As the Puritan John Winthrop declared in 1630, the holy commonwealth at Massachusetts Bay would be a ‘Citty on a Hille,’ a beacon of inspiration for all Christendom. By the revolutionary era, the city on a hill had spread to the whole society: America became ‘God’s New Israel.’ As the new nation grew richer and more powerful during the nineteenth century, the profounder religious meanings of Providence began to fall away. Prosperity itself came to seem a sign of God’s blessing-at least to the more affluent, who have always felt drawn to secular notions of Providence. Like the Rockefellers and other prominent pewholders in Protestant churches, America was rich because it deserved to be. For the deserving nation as for the deserving individual, progress was inevitable. Or so the more fortunate have assumed, from the first Gilded Age to our own more recent one.
“A providentially ordered society contained little space for gamblers — at least in its conventional morality. Yet it was precisely the pervasiveness of social uncertainty that made the insistence on moral certainty so necessary. The salience of secular providence rose in response to the comparative openness of American society. Fortunate people have always wanted to believe that they deserved their good fortune, but fortunate Americans were in especially urgent need of reassurance. Compared to the Old World, the United States was a riot of shape-shifting status strivers. Beginning in colonial times, the abolition of hereditary privilege broadened opportunities for counterfeiting profitable selves. Main Chances multiplied with the emergence of unregulated market society in the early nineteenth century. As in Dostoevsky’s Roulettenburg, impostors proliferated, and the very boundlessness of American possibility demanded a stricter set of internal prohibitions than were available in aristocratic old Europe. The exorcism of the confidence man required the invocation of his double, the self-made man.
“As the apotheosis of plodding diligence, the cult of self-made manhood has posed severe challenges to American gamblers. For more than two centuries, our moralists and success mythologists have disdained gambling and denied chance, arguing that ‘you make your own luck’ and insisting on a solid link between merit and reward. The New York Times columnist William Safire echoes generations of clerical critics in his bitter condemnations of legalized gambling. ‘The truth is that nothing is for nothing,’ he writes. ‘Hard work, talent, merit, will win you something. Reliance on luck, playing the sucker, will make you a loser all your life.’ In a competitive society, few apparitions are more terrifying than the specter of ‘the loser’ — the poor sap who never really grasps how to play the game.
“Yet the defenders of diligence have never entirely vanquished the devotees of chance. At least since Tocqueville compared American society to ‘a vast lottery,’ our business mythology has celebrated risk-taking, knowing when to hold and when to fold, taking advantage of ‘the breaks.’ Especially in flush times, it has not always been easy to distinguish gambling from speculation or investment, and even Horatio Alger knew that luck was as important as pluck in achieving success. The gambler, endlessly starting over with every hand of cards, has embodied the American metaphysic of reinventing the self, reawakening possibilities from one moment to the next. The gambler and the entrepreneur have been twinned.”
— from Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Viking, 2003)